How-To: Stay Within Your Data Allowance

Now that AT&T, along with all the providers internationally, have scrapped unlimited data plans and introduced caps, you’ll need to keep an eye on how much data you’re actually using. Here are a few ways to make sure you don’t end up going over your monthly allowance.

Checking What You Have Left

First off, make sure you know how to check how much data you have left for the month. On an iPad 3G, you can go to Settings ? Cellular Data, then tap View Account. After logging in, you’ll be able to see how much data you have remaining.

On an iPhone, for AT&T customers, dial *DATA# (*3282#) and you’ll be shown on screen your data usage for the current month. You can also go to your account on the AT&T website. For customers on O2 in the UK, you can either download the MyO2 app or visit the MyO2 website. Other customers should visit the website for their provider to find out how to check your data usage.

Reducing the Amount You Use

The first thing you’re going to want to do is try to use Wi-Fi as much as you can to save using 3G data at all. Many places such as Starbucks and McDonalds offer free Wi-Fi, and there are many apps that can help you find others. Some network providers also offer free Wi-Fi with their iPhone and iPad data plans.

If for some reason you don’t have access to any Wi-Fi, the next step is cutting down on everything that automatically checks the Internet, such as Mail. Having your emails checked every 15 minutes is going to rack up a lot of megabytes, especially if you’re the type of person who gets hundreds of emails a week. If you want to go all out with saving data, change the settings of Mail to fetch emails manually. This means that your device will only check for new emails if you open the Mail app. You can set this up by going to Settings ? Mail, Contacts, Calendars ? Fetch New Data and choosing ‘manually’. If you are unable to cope with emails not coming through automatically, then set a low frequency — 30 minutes or an hour.

If even that doesn’t suit your needs, you can use Push, which, instead of your device checking the server regularly, whenever you get an email, the server will send it to you. This means that you save on some data usage because your device isn’t checking when there are no emails. However, this requires an email service which supports Push, which most don’t. For example, Gmail doesn’t support it, and neither does Windows Live Mail.

Another thing you can do to help is stop using sites which have a lot of images. For example, Flickr will use a lot more data than, say, this site. Visiting Flickr involves loading a lot of images whereas this site is mostly text. By visiting mainly text-based sites you can reduce your data usage a fair amount. Saying that, however, a lot of websites have mobile-friendly versions, such as Facebook and Twitter. They usually have fewer images, and any images they do have are lower resolution, meaning they take less data to load.

Finally, the last resort, when you’re extremely close to going over the limit, is to turn off cellular data altogether. This means it’s impossible to use any more data because you’re not connecting to the network. To do this, load up Settings and go to Cellular Data on the iPad or General ? Network on the iPhone. There, you should see a toggle switch labeled ‘Cellular Data’. Switch that to the off position and your device won’t connect to the data network again until you turn it back on. The benefit of using this over Airplane Mode is you can still receive texts and calls this way, you just can’t use any data unless you use Wi-Fi.